Wearable Tech with LilyPad

#LadyMaker Tenaya Hurst provided each mother/daughter team with a wearable technology sewing kit and taught them to make interactive garments using conductive thread, LED lights, and LilyPad microcontrollers. As Tenaya explains, “This activity is a great way to learn about electricity, while still having something to show for it when you’re done. In doing the activity, no one is ever bad or wrong, it’s just that the light isn’t on. Then we just have to keep trying new things to find success.”

Here are Tenaya’s basic steps for sewing with conductive thread.

Building your soft circuitry with the LilyPad microcontroller and conductive thread takes some careful planning because, as Tenaya reminds us, “electricity has rules.” Here are instructions for creating a simple circuit with a single LED light.

Once you’ve found success with a single LED light, you can add more.

For an extra challenge, try building more complex circuitry with a second microcontroller. Remember, positive to positive and negative to negative!

As shown in this diagram, your positively and negatively charged threads must never cross. That’s part of the design challenge!